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What can I say except you're welcome? Here we go with the seventh chapter of 2025. Lovely to have you all here, and I hope you enjoy this one. If you do, feel free to head over to patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/oghenevwogaga) and read the next three chapters- I update there on a daily basis so there's always something for you to read.
It took weeks for word to return from Konoha. That was, in reality, not a long time. Messenger hawks flew slowly, and we had sent this one weighed down with three bodies- Omoikane, Inukuro, and Choni, and with news of our victory and the losses we had incurred in claiming such victory. Izuku's body remained in Uzume's possession. She refused to hand it over, and none of us had been willing to force it from her. Even with her eyes covered by a thick layer of bandages and gauze, she had one hell of a glare.
But when the word did come, it was far from what we wanted to hear. "Congratulations. Your victory is acknowledged. Maintain position and await reinforcements. Do not push further into Suna. Inform command if anything changes" That was it. That was the whole message. I had no idea what game Hiruzen was playing here, but it was doing little to endear him to me. We had the chance now. Suna was bloodied. We could march in. Take a border town or two. Create an outpost for future Konoha forces while heading East towards the capital and crippling their economic base for this war. We did not want to be done.
"What do we do?" Kizuru turned to me and asked. I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to damn the orders and make Suna pay. But no matter how badly I wanted to, all I could think of was Izuku's blank smile as I carved his eyes out of his eyelids and put them in Uzume's head. He was dead. So was Choni. So was Omoikane,
"We obey the orders we've been given. We stay put, and we scout. We keep an eye on what Suna does next. If another force enters the Land of Rivers, we have to be the first to know" I said, and I ignored the way Shika let out a relieved sigh. She knew me well. She knew what I had been tempted to do just now, and it did bring some joy knowing that even if she wasn't in support, she would have backed me regardless-such was the loyalty of a Nara.
"Yes Captain" Kizuru said with a salute, heading back towards the rooms. Mud release had also come with other benefits. The ability to turn the ground into mud and then shift it according to my will meant that the hole in the ground that we'd been forced to call home had now grown enough space to be considered a proper underground bunker in every sense of the word. I even had managed to save a room for myself to use as medbay/ lab.
That was where I headed immediately as we dispersed into our various groups.
"What did the hawk say?" She asked.
"Nothing unexpected. Just to maintain position and make sure we report if Suna gets on the move again." He told her as he moved to her seated form and began to inspect the bandages.
Reaching out with my medical chakra and activating my byakugan, I could tell that the eyes behind the bangs had healed fully.
"Okay, we can take these things off now" I said.
"Now? And they were only just beginning to stop itching, you know?"
"Sure, I can leave them on if you want me to"
"Shorirama Senju"
"Fine, fine. I'm as curious to see what these things can do as you are" I said, unwrapping the bandages and cutting them as I proceeded. In a matter of seconds, Uzume's eyes were bared to the world. She still had them shut. And then she snapped them open, revealing gleaming red eyes.
Her triangular pattern was now matched with a circle that connected all the points of the triangle, fully enclosing it from without.
"So, do you know what your abilities are?" I asked.
"I have a fair idea" She said.
"One of them was Fusion, which Izuku and I used. Although, I can tell that since Izuku and I used the ability of each other and fused into this, I've lost access to it. The other one? Well, it's best if I show you" She said. I nodded.
We made our way out of the base, and then travelled several kilometers away to make sure that we didn't inadvertently reveal our camp. With our eyes, we'd know if we were being watched by most, but no one ever died from being too careful.
"I need you to attack me. Whatever you've got, use it" She said.
"You sure?" I asked.
"Yeah, yeah. Get it over with".
"What level of attack are we talking about here," I asked.
"The biggest, baddest thing you've got. It's just grasslands and a drying stream here. You can go all out" She said.
I stared at her, wondering if she was insane, but part of me was undoubtedly excited to see something cool.
I should probably have held back and used something else, but I never got to use my favourite jutsu all that often, and if she said she could take it, then she could take it.
I had three natural affinities: wind, earth, and water. It was perhaps a bit disgraceful that my favorite jutsu used exactly none of those elements. Well, in my defence, who didn't want to shoot lightning from their fingertips like Chancellor Palpatine? I hadn't quite figured out a way to reliably aim 'lightning fingies' as I was coming to call them, but I did have the next best thing.
Like all my best techniques, it started with the rasengan as its base. Kakashi created the Chidori by failing to add lightning nature to the Rasengan. I always wondered what a successful attempt of that would look it. It ended up being something like this. Lightning natured chakra did not take easily to being forced to rotate around a fixed point. Even with perfect chakra control and the ability to see what I was doing, physics was physics. So I took a different approach. A very volatile approach.
With a single handseal, the ground around me turned into mud that wrapped around my body. The first time, I'd tried this, only UzuSenju healing prevented me from spending the better part of a month in the hospital even with Tsunade's healing. It started in the core. Lightning release was one of the more interesting elements because using more chakra didn't have to mean more lightning. When you overpowered a fireball jutsu, you almost always got a bigger fireball and nothing else. Maybe you could make it hotter with more control and experience, but that heat was often a factor of control and experience rather than overpowering it with chakra.
Lightning was different. I formed the core of the rasengan with my hand pointed right at Uzume. She said she could take it, right. The core of the rasengan was a single spark of lightning natured chakra. A spark with nearly a quarter of my chakra within it. Around it, I formed the rasengan, spiraling threads of chakra rotating at immense speed around the core formed. That was only the first layer. With a flex of my chakra, I enclosed the rasengan around the core, making it so small it was about the size of a tennis ball. Next to that, I created another spark. Without eyes like mine, this was basically impossible.
This spark was less powerful than the other one, but it was negatively charged were the other was positively charged. Around this spark, another rasengan formed, spiraling in the exact opposite direction. To my eyes, the jutsu looked like one sun within another. I turned to Uzume.
"Get ready, Uzume" I called out before releasing my hold on the jutsu. It fired out, smashing into her while I sank into the mud I'd created, forcing it to take me deeper and deeper.
Through the mud, I could sense when the jutsu exploded. The explosion of light and chakra was so powerful that it was impossible to miss it from even this deep. When it had run its course, I forced my mud to take me to the surface, smashing through the caked over top of the mud lake I'd created.
I whistled, looking at the landscape. It was like Thor had taken his hammer and decided to smite the space Uzume had been standing in. That was the name of the Jutsu, by the way. Thor's Hammer. I thought of something like Lightning Release: Rasengan, but that failed to capture the scope of what I'd accomplished here.
I walked towards the deep crater, looking within to find her just as she had been before the jutsu was even fired. Her clothes were the same. Her hair was the same. There wasn't even a scratch on her.
"It's called Fudō," she said as she jumped out of the crater.
"Some kind of teleportation jutsu?" Because surely, she hadn't been hit by that jutsu and come out so unscathed. I'd give Thor's Hammer good odds of cracking even a Sussano'o open- I'd made it as my answer to impenetrable defenses, after all.
"Nope. My left eye has Yūgō, my right has Fudō. Fudō allows me to be unaffected by anything under the Sun" She said.
"Anything? Literally anything?" I wondered.
"It's stasis, immovability, all of those things at once. The world could end around me and I wouldn't feel it".
"How's the chakra drain?" I wondered, giving her a once over. She'd seen a healthy dip.
"Severe. I can use it maybe eight times in a day without dying of chakra exhaustion. Realistically, I'd only be able to use six Times while still having enough to use other techniques and be useful in combat." She said.
"Does it matter the scale or size of the attack?"
"It can't tell. It's being applied to me, not the attack itself, so I guess it would be the same even if I was using it to block a kunai" She said.
"And anything? What about gaseous attacks?"
"I don't breathe when it's active. Nothing affects me" She said.
"I see. So a ninja Siberian then." I theorized.
"What?"
"Never mind. Just a silly thought. Well, congratulations. You're officially stronger than me" I said.
"I was always going to be. I am an Uchiha, after all".
"Someone's forgotten how Konoha was founded then" I said with a chuckle. I found the pride they held inc their blood to be quite amusing. The two strongest Uchiha in record history had fallen in battle against the two strongest Senju. It wasn't a contest.
Besides, I was certain she wouldn't be stronger than me for long. I was working on a few things. Staring at Uzume now made it clear that Whale Sage Mode was a no-go. Not for a very long time, at least. She would be getting stronger every day and I would rather not find myself in a situation where I sacrificed all potential for future growth and found myself unable to measure up.
There were basically four ways to elevate oneself to the top of the ninja world: Mangekyou Sharingan, Perfect Jinchuriki, Sage Mode, and Hiriashin. Hiriashin was what I had in mind here. If I could figure out the rasengan, and even nature release, who would ever say I wouldn't be able to perfect the most difficult of my Granduncle's jutsus. I couldn't allow it to be someone from outside the clan.
Of course, that meant I'd owe Minato a thing or two. Hopefully, he remained in the Academy for a long, long time and didn't find himself in the middle of this war. Maybe if we weren't losing as we were in canon, then Hiruzen would let the kids be kids.
"Doesn't matter. I'm stronger than you" She said, poking me in the chest.
"Thanks to fancy eyes, don't get ahead of yourself"
"You're one to talk, Mr. Perfect Chakra Control"
I shrugged.
"I haven't sparred in a while…" I led.
I didn't even get an audible reply. Just a punch aimed at my face.
XXXX
The Flying thunder god jutsu was a jutsu used in conjunction with the Hiriashin seal to travel to pre-marked locations at instantaneous speeds, I reminded myself again as I stared at gibberish. Gibberish was honestly being generous. One thing I had managed to find from days of looking through the old man's notes was the thunder god jutsu was absolute bullshit. It should not have worked. Tobirama never came out and acknowledged this in his writings, but he did hint at pretty heavily. One of those hints was that he could not explain how the technique worked for the life of him. Sure, he knew what it did, but how it worked? Those were two different things.
Still, I was making progress. Extremely slow progress, however. For the first time in my life, I was forced to use the shadow clone learning method. Yes, it meant I had to use medical ninjutsu to soothe the persistent headache from blending eight different sets of memories together, but I was also progressing almost eight times as fast. That meant I could get a year's worth of progress in about forty-five days. Or over a week's worth of progress in a day, if you had to think about it like that.
So far, after two weeks in normal time, I had been able to figure out that the Hiriashin seal Granduncle Tobirama used had four components - one, an identification seal to allow him know which seal he was intending to jump to at any point in time. Two, a homing seal to allow him to sense all the tags regardless of where they were in the multiverse. And I really did mean multiverse here. Flying thunder god was a space-time ninjutsu that didn't work, as I'd thought, by bending space between two points and allowing a person to jump between them, but by summoning oneself to the space between dimensions, and then jumping back out to the chosen seal. The third component was the summoning seal that made the teleportation possible. The fourth component was the thread that made it possible for all these seals to work together.
Even the notes I had from Grandmother Mito were nearly useless when it came to deciphering this mess. And I wasn't going to be risking my life by trying to figure out the seal and experimenting with negative space until I had a full understanding of what exactly I was doing. And that was not all, I didn't just have to figure out how the seals worked, but how to design my own. Looking at Granduncle Tobirama's seals for so long made me certain that I couldn't just learn the jutsu and go hopping around. The seals were designed to interface and work with only his specific chakra signature as the designer. If anyone else tried, well, either nothing happened, or everything happened.
"Come in" I called as I heard a knock on the door. I'd made sure to impress on everyone that I was experimenting with highly delicate and experimental seals so no one should have been disturbing me and I could have just ignored the call if I wanted to, but I was desperate for a distraction at this point.
"What are you working on?" Uzume asked as she strolled in. I wondered if it was a result of having Izuku in her, but Uzume sought out my presence more often these days than she ever had prior to this.
"My granduncle's jutsu. The flying thunder god" She hummed and walked forward, ignoring my clones who were bent over their notes, not even registering her presence to come to the desk I sat crouched atop.
"The one that he could teleport with?" She asked.
"That one."
"So what's the issue? You never take this long to figure things out?" She asked. I wondered how I must have looked for her to so easily come to the conclusion that I must have been struggling with the jutsu.
"It's the seal. It's supposed to do so many things at the same time and some of them just don't make sense together, and then I have to come up with my own seal language for it" I said with a sigh.
"Your own language?"
"The Uzumaki script can't express the concepts that this seal does. That's why no one can figure out the Hiriashin. It's my grandfather's own sealing language linked with his chakra and blood. It only works for him and I have to do the same if I want to get the jutsu to work as well" I said.
"But never mind all that. What brings you here?"
"If you say so. When I fought Piandao for the second time, do you remember the technique I hit him with?"
"The genjutsu that made him start screaming like a mad man? That would be a bit difficult to forget".
"It's Izuku's left eye's technique- Hakkyō. It's basically a genjutsu that drives those it's used on insane."
"I see. What about it?"
"I was able to use it on Piandao even when I didn't have his eyes in my head. That means that I could have copied over his mangekyou ability with fusion. I know the eternal mangekyou only makes me able to use the abilities I already have but what if I can rely on Izuku's as well" She said. It was a good idea.
"So how are you going to test it?" I asked. And then she gave me a look. A look which I knew meant trouble.
"Absolutely no way" I said.
"You can just let me use it on one of your clones"
"And then what happens when it dispels, and I get all its memories?" I asked.
"Well, I need some way to test it" She said.
"I'll speak to Shika about sending out a few more patrols. Uraume and Shiba won't mind helping you hunt down some Suna nin to practice on, and I think being out of the base would be good for them," I said. I could understand their pain even if I couldn't fully relate. Izuku was dead, but he lived on in Uzume, so my grief was assuaged by that fact. They had no such consolation. Inukuro was gone. And even if no one would never say it to his face, it was because Shiba could not say no to the man he loved.
"Alright then. That works. I'll be off now, but for your problem, you should consider trying to get every bit of it to work individually before putting it all together. Like that Rasengan of yours" She said as she walked away. Why the hell hadn't I thought about that?
A/N: And that's the chappy. FTG. Did anyone have any bets on FTG? As always, the next three chapters are up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/oghenevwogaga). If you just want to read complete chapters and not my work in real-time, then feel free to purchase this story as a collection on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/oghenevwogaga) page so you get to read each chapter after I finish it and not necessarily the daily updates available with a regular patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/oghenevwogaga) membership- nice way to support this story and me while you're at it. Enjoy!